The Dublin Review - pt. 2 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Art. III.—TRADES UNIONISM AMONG WOMEN IN IRELAND. IT is important that women should be organised everywhere, but in Ireland especially so. Her greatest indust... more »ry, numerically by far her greatest, is also pre-eminently a female industry. The linen trade of Ireland still holds the markets of the world; a province is populous with its mills ; and in this great trade the percentage of women and girls employed was in 1886 (the latest return obtainable) : Women. Girls. Belfast . . 59-1 . . 17'8 District . . 44'3 . . 21-7 It is on account of Ulster that Ireland has this especial claim : but there is only too appealing a necessity also in Dublin and the larger cities, and even in the mills scattered throughout the country. It is true that Mr. Redgrave, the Chief Inspector of Factories, is quoted in the Report of the Sweating Commission as having stated that " in Dublin there is very little sweating, indeed hardly any; in fact, I did not come across a single sweater's workshop similar to the London ones ; and in Belfast the same." And our own inspector makes the same report. But they used the word " sweating " in its technical sense of the filtration of wages through a middleman, or a series of middlemen ; in its looser and (through a natural association of ideas) very popular sense of starvation wages and long hours we can hold our own lamentably well. We may most safely take it for granted that the match-box makers of Dublin are no less miserably paid than the match-box makers of London, whose wages for a week of seventy-two hours is five to six shillings; or piecework payment (the wretchedness of which, however, can only be realised by those who have seen it) at twopence-farthing a gross of match-boxes. Out of this, moreover, the workers pay for paste, hemp, and, in the wint...« less